Yesterday I published a blog post reporting that, based on StatCounter data, Linux had reached 10% market share in the USA. But a follower on Threads sent me an article debunking it (thanks for the tip!).
Okay Goguma, you posted fake news on your blog. You messed up.
It’s possible I got carried away by information published in several articles, and besides, I checked the source and it was true. According to StatCounter, it did reach 10% in the USA. But it’s also true that a jump of this magnitude is very unusual, and it’s likely it did rise, just not that much. The problem is that it’s not clear how they measure it, and other measurements give very different figures.
Good job, Goguma. What did you find out?
Well, according to the article I mentioned at the beginning, if we look at global traffic on other platforms like Cloudflare, Linux usage is much lower, around 4.7% when filtering for human users. Even so, there’s still significant growth, just much slower than the one announced in the earlier headline.
How is this possible? It’s almost half.
In the previous article I mentioned that a possible reason for the increase in market share could be AI, and that the penguin’s system has superior performance. Well, it turns out the issue might come from there.
Apparently, the 10% comes from AI bots, since until recently a significant percentage of machines showed up as “other,” but these have been reclassified as Linux. That’s where the increase comes from. What’s more, Cloudflare lets you filter by human users versus bots. If we add the bots back in, Linux usage percentages almost triple.
But bots use Linux too, right?
Although they technically use Linux, they’re not human users, so no, for me that hasn’t reached 10%. I think it will keep growing steadily but more slowly; there won’t be any more major jumps. Maybe in 2027, when Windows 10 support ends completely, and it will also depend on how computer prices evolve.
It’s also possible the real figure sits somewhere in between, between 5% and 10%, but we’ll see in the future, because now that the spotlight is on this, it will push for better measurement systems.
But Linux isn’t for everyone
Regardless of the percentage, it must be said that even as Linux grows, it’s not for everyone, especially while specialized software isn’t 100% compatible. There’s also hardware, which isn’t always compatible either. For example, in Korea the .hwp format is widely used, a document format from the Korean company Hancom. It’s like a PDF or Word file. The problem is there’s no Linux version, and it’s difficult to use. And there will be more cases like this, they just don’t affect me.
There are also people who simply don’t like it, whatever the reason. The good thing is there are options for everyone; for me, Linux’s advantages outweigh these small hassles that may come up.
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